Anna Larina, 82, the Widow Of Bukharin, Dies in Moscow

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: February 26, 1996

MOSCOW, Feb. 25—
Anna Mikhailovna Larina, the widow of Nikolai I. Bukharin, a father of the Bolshevik Revolution who was executed under Stalin, and herself a survivor of the Soviet gulag, died of lung cancer here on Saturday, her daughter, Nadezhda Fadeyeva, said. She was 82.

When Bukharin, a trusted comrade of Lenin and a rival to Stalin, was condemned in 1938 in the last of the Moscow show trials, his young wife was banished and spent 20 years in exile and Soviet prison camps. Before they were separated, Bukharin instructed his wife to memorize his final testament, in which he implored future generations of Communist leaders to exonerate him. Not daring to write it down, she later recalled, she used to lull herself to sleep in prison by repeating her husband's words silently to herself "like a prayer." It was not published in full until 1988.

Miss Larina's autobiography, "This I Cannot Forget," created a sensation when it was published in Russia in 1988 as part of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's rehabilitation of Bukharin. But long before, while she was still in exile, Miss Larina waged a tireless campaign to exonerate her husband after Stalin's death, writing long, detailed letters to Nikita Khrushchev and his successors demanding Bukharin's reinstatement in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes.

Miss Larina's book was an instant best-seller. A harrowing prison memoir as well as a loving, uncritical tribute to Bukharin, it is also one of the few first-person accounts of repression and prison life by a fallen member of the Bolshevik ruling elite. Miss Larina was the adopted daughter of a leading Communist revolutionary, Yuri Larin, and grew up in the Metropole Hotel, the residence of many Soviet leaders, dandled on the knee of Lenin. She had known Bukharin, who was 25 years older than she and a friend of her father's, all her life. She was 16 when they became engaged -- Stalin hand-delivered her first love letter to Bukharin -- and 20 when they married.

She was 24 when she was sent into exile and separated from their infant son, Yuri, whom she did not see again until he was 20. The boy was passed around by relatives and later raised in a state orphanage. He only learned who his father was in 1956, when he was allowed to visit his mother in exile. She was released in 1959, and returned to Moscow with her second husband, Fyodor Fadeyev, a fellow prisoner she met in Siberia, and their two children.

Stephen F. Cohen, a Princeton University historian who published a biography of Bukharin in 1973, met clandestinely with the widow during the Brezhnev era and became a close friend, discovering in the archives and returning to her the last love letter Bukharin wrote to her, on Jan. 15, 1938, from prison. He was shot two months later.

Mr. Cohen described Miss Larina as "the last living link to the generation that made the revolution." He added that it was her remarkable personality that cemented their friendship. "She lost everything," Mr. Cohen said, "but she showed no bitterness. She endured this horrible experience but it didn't deform her psychologically. In 1988, she was able to resume public life in a way that astonished people."

After winning the campaign to rehabilitate her husband, Miss Larina devoted her last years to trying to recover Bukharin's long-hidden prison writings, philosophical essays, poems and also an autobiographical novel, which were unearthed from secret party archives in 1992. The novel is scheduled to be published in English by Columbia University Press later this year.

In addition to her daughter and her son Yuri Larin, Miss Larina is survived by her second son, Mikhail Fadeyev.